Public Lands Master Thread

[Alefroth]

Huh, didn't see this coming.

Hundreds of thousands of acres inside what used to be Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument will be opened to mining and drilling under a plan the Bureau of Land Management released Friday, renewing charges that President Donald Trump’s executive action reducing the 23-year-old preserve was engineered to promote energy extraction in some of America’s most scenic landscapes.

[Enough]

So the new BLM head, William Perry Pendley (the one who thinks all public lands should be sold/privatized) was at our campus today for the SEJ conference. He was on a panel discussion and was asked what is the biggest challenge on public lands today. His response? Why wild horses and burros of course!

[hitbyambulance]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate- ... ing-trump/

more unbridled evil, as far as i'm concerned

how does one even go about stopping this?

[LawBeefaroni]

how does one even go about stopping this?

There's a way: armed white dudes occupy federal lands.

[LawBeefaroni]

Non-paywall.

Major banks also took a stand against drilling operations in the area, with firms like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo declaring they will not help finance projects involving oil drilling.

I mean if the banks aren't backing it, should be a lot easier to stop.

Also, why doesn't Musk or Bezos or someone step up and just lease it? Lots of talk, maybe back it up with something other than shareholder money? Or with, hell.

Financially, the plan aims to generate $1 billion to $1.8 billion in revenue, but calculations done by the Center for American Progress estimates that the federal government would receive around $37.5 million from drilling leases, assuming an acre is sold for $50.

That's like me donating my change at the supermarket checkout.

[Jaymann]

So the new BLM head, William Perry Pendley (the one who thinks all public lands should be sold/privatized) was at our campus today for the SEJ conference. He was on a panel discussion and was asked what is the biggest challenge on public lands today. His response? Why wild horses and burros of course!

So he is the head of Burro Lives Matter?

[malchior]

Non-paywall.

Major banks also took a stand against drilling operations in the area, with firms like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo declaring they will not help finance projects involving oil drilling.

I mean if the banks aren't backing it, should be a lot easier to stop.

It's attempted looting but no one really wants the rights. Oil prices are at prices that make it uneconomical to extract it. Even if thet get it cheap and plan to wait for oil prices to rebound to drill, they still have to get it out of these pristine areas and they know the environmental regs are going to bog them down. Long-term even the oil companies are rushing to turn Free Cash Flow into diversified energy products - especially green energy companies. They know what is coming.

[LawBeefaroni]

The "Great Negotiator" getting $0.03 on the dollar.

In one of its last strikes against the American wilderness, Donald Trump’s administration will on Wednesday auction off portions of the Arctic national wildlife refuge to oil drillers.

The lease sales are the climax to one of the nation’s highest-profile environmental battles. The lands on the northern coastal plain of Alaska are home to denning polar bears and migrating herds of Porcupine caribou that indigenous communities depend on and consider sacred. But the oil industry has long suspected that the ground beneath the plain holds billions of barrels of petroleum.

...

Trump and congressional Republicans argued that the government’s earnings from drilling in the refuge could help pay for the proposed tax cuts, which favored corporations and wealthier Americans. They said development would generate $900m, although an analysis by the non-partisan watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, based on historical bid data, found that it would bring in just a fraction of that amount – no more than $27.6m. That would be split between the federal government and the state of Alaska.

“The fact that this was being offered as an offset was definitely insincere at best, and we thought that was just kind of a joke,” said Autumn Hanna, vice-president of the group.

A travesty and national embarrassment. Trading a priceless asset for tax cuts.

[Enough]

The "Great Negotiator" getting $0.03 on the dollar.

In one of its last strikes against the American wilderness, Donald Trump’s administration will on Wednesday auction off portions of the Arctic national wildlife refuge to oil drillers.

The lease sales are the climax to one of the nation’s highest-profile environmental battles. The lands on the northern coastal plain of Alaska are home to denning polar bears and migrating herds of Porcupine caribou that indigenous communities depend on and consider sacred. But the oil industry has long suspected that the ground beneath the plain holds billions of barrels of petroleum.

...

Trump and congressional Republicans argued that the government’s earnings from drilling in the refuge could help pay for the proposed tax cuts, which favored corporations and wealthier Americans. They said development would generate $900m, although an analysis by the non-partisan watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, based on historical bid data, found that it would bring in just a fraction of that amount – no more than $27.6m. That would be split between the federal government and the state of Alaska.

“The fact that this was being offered as an offset was definitely insincere at best, and we thought that was just kind of a joke,” said Autumn Hanna, vice-president of the group.

A travesty and national embarrassment. Trading a priceless asset for tax cuts.

This one is a gut punch. In grad school I did a fair amount of research on ANWR and got to know some of the wildlife biologists working in the 1042/Arctic Plain calving area and welp this amounts to a nuclear strike on America's Serengeti. There's a lawsuit decision coming out today that could scuttle/delay the sale, fingers crossed.

[Isgrimnur]

CNN

(CNN)President Joe Biden on Friday announced the expansion of three national monuments -- Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine -- in a move that restored protections that had been undone by then-President Donald Trump.

"This may be the easiest thing I've ever done as president, so far," Biden said ahead of making the announcement.
...
Bear Ears National Monument will be restored to 1.36 million acres and the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument will be restored to 1.87 million acres, according to the fact sheet. Additionally, protections for the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts monument off the coast of New England, as established under then-President Barack Obama, will be restored.

[Alefroth]

Nice. I'd assumed protection would be very difficult to restore after it had been removed.